


Redacted

by SylvanWitch



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Episode Tag for s01e06, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-07
Updated: 2013-11-07
Packaged: 2017-12-31 18:05:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1034747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Melinda May didn’t sleep.</i>
</p><p><i>She didn’t eat or smile or feel the heat or cold or blink an eyelash at blood splattered the length of her body.</i><br/>At least, that’s what they said at S.H.I.E.L.D.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Redacted

**Author's Note:**

> There are mild spoilers herein for s01e06, "F.Z.Z.T.," so be warned. It just seemed to me that there were some things Melinda might have wanted to say to Jemma, too.

Melinda May didn’t sleep.

She didn’t eat or smile or feel the heat or cold or blink an eyelash at blood splattered the length of her body.

At least, that’s what they said at S.H.I.E.L.D.

Since S.H.I.E.L.D. was the only place she still had a name at all—everywhere else she’d been erased; even people she’d known as a girl had forgotten her, deliberately or with the coercive power of money and fear—Melinda herself had started to wonder if some of it were true.

After all, he who writes the report controls the narrative.

That’s one reason she’d come to work for Phil Coulson.  He had a story a lot like her own, places that were black with redaction, euphemized into innocuousness or sanitized for committees.  When he wrote the narrative of her life at S.H.I.E.L.D., he could be trusted to make her human, at least.

Or a robot, just like him, as the whispered speculation suggested. 

Either way she’d be in good company in the history books.

The other reason she’d come with Coulson was standing in the lab, illuminated only by the blinking lights of her beloved machines, looking utterly lost and far too young to be so alone.

Jemma Simmons was lovely, carved ivory cheekbones, swan’s column of a throat, bright, beautiful eyes and Cupid’s bow lips that turned up into a girl’s giggling smile whenever Fitz said something funny in the language only she and he spoke.

Somehow, Melinda never felt outside of those jokes, even if she didn’t understand them.  Jemma’s eyes would turn to her, inviting her into the warmth of their laughter, and Melinda would have to resist.

Lately, it had grown harder, which might explain why she was standing in the cargo bay halfway to the lab.

She could have withstood the brightness of laughter, but there was nothing left in her to resist the delicious agony of Jemma’s loss, a haunted and haunting look so familiar that it was to Melinda like looking in a mirror.

She had a thousand lifetimes on this willowy little girl, but in her Melinda saw what was left of the child she’d been.  Something in Melinda May, who was otherwise never maternal, wanted only to wrap that girl up and take her away from this place.

Something else wanted to devour her, take her inside, consume her, waste the child in a fury of passionate fire that would leave them both panting and broken, mingling their tears with the cold ash of their mutual and forever lost innocence.

Damned either way—frozen without or on fire within—Melinda hesitated, long enough at least that Jemma came to the door, which opened with a whoosh that sounded like an exhaled breath in the cavernous space.

“Are you alright, Melinda?” Jemma asked, cultured voice tripping over May’s first name, which she’d never used before.

“That’s my line,” she answered, remembering why she’d come, what had happened to bring her here.  The tearful goodbye and the strength of her conviction and the wingless flight, a hopeless, helpless plummet from which Melinda couldn’t have saved her and hadn’t tried.

“I’m fine.” 

“That’s a lie.” 

“Yes, I suppose it is.”  She took a few more steps toward Melinda, heels punctuating her advance.

“You almost died today.”  Melinda wasn’t good at platitudes, didn’t do comfort.  What little she could offer came only from her own house of horrors, from the rooms in her memory she kept locked and barred.  She’d pried the boards off of one of those rooms already today, offering Phil what little she could.

She could hear the last chain falling away from the darkest room of all as Jemma crossed the space between them, coming to her as if she weren’t offering only a history of sorrow written in blood.

“You look so sad,” Jemma answered, and it wasn’t quite a non-sequitur.  Then she raised one graceful white hand and ran it down Melinda’s tearless cheek.

“I—,” she started, stalling over the words.  What could she say that would help?  Why had she come here?  She brought nothing but ruin in her wake.  Ruin and heartache and ghosts that wouldn’t let her sleep.  “I should go,” she finished, stepping out of Jemma’s reach.

The girl’s hand remained there, stretched toward her as if in supplication, and Melinda was strong at all the broken places except for one.

She grabbed the hand and pulled Jemma off-balance, as if she might throw her hard and away.  Except the fulcrum of the motion brought Jemma into contact with Melinda’s body, brought them close enough that Jemma’s hair shivered against Melinda’s cheek.

Melinda took in a startled breath, let it out in a shiver that echoed along Jemma’s skin, and then they were kissing, chaste, closed lips pressed tight, a sound coming from the girl like she was holding something behind her teeth.

Then she was opening to Melinda, inviting her into the sweetness of her hot mouth, stunning her with a sinuous tongue that glided along her own.

Melinda’s hands grasped the slender waist, mind calculating torque and weight and mass and tension, body growing warm with the need to lay her out beneath her and measure other things:  the way her heart raced when Melinda took a pert nipple between her teeth, the number of times her mouth stuttered over Melinda’s name as her fingers gathered wetness from her folds or dipped inside her. 

The pressure of her fingers as they dug into Melinda’s shoulders, urging her mouth down and down until she could taste the sweetness of her.

The strength in her supple legs as she wrapped them around Melinda’s thighs and urged her deeper, one calf abrading the leather straps that held the harness in place.

The way her pulse weakened as she bled out.  The seconds it took for her eyes to glaze over with the cold accusation of the forever dead.

With every ounce of strength left in her and swallowing a cry of denial, Melinda pulled away, dropping her hands from Jemma’s waist and using one to wipe the glistening evidence of their kiss from her mouth.

“I’m sorry,” she managed, voice rough but steady.  “I—we can’t.”

“I’m sorry too,” Jemma said, tears in her eyes belying the brave smile she had put on for the occasion.

“I didn’t mean—I only wanted…”

“I know,” Jemma answered, looking suddenly much older than her years and like maybe she’d finally let go of something she should have been allowed to keep forever.  “Thank you.”

Melinda nodded, words beyond her, and retreated back the way she’d come.  She didn’t look back, didn’t pause at the doorway to rethink, didn’t let her shoulders alter one millimeter from their usual rigid posture.

Didn’t miss the little sigh that carried across the growing space between them.

Didn’t regret it.

_Didn’t._

Melinda May didn’t sleep or eat or smile or laugh and she certainly didn’t love.  Maybe once there’d been a girl, but that story had been blacked over, blotted out, retold in safe phrases and left for someone else to decipher.

There’d never be another, no matter how much Jemma Simmons reminded her of someone she might once have been or could once have loved forever.

Melinda May didn’t love. The end.

 


End file.
